I Graduated!

I am overwhelmingly happy to report that I have graduated from being a Neurological patient for 2 sudden and painful strokes I had last summer! My Neurologist will see me on an "as needed" basis and is taking me off the last medication he was treating me with. He was quite impressed with my progress and lack of lingering complications. I am utterly grateful! The probability of it happening again is as close to nil as you can get so hopefully I see him again never! I told him all about The Fibromyalgia Crusade and gave him a postcard and explained Lilac, Mulberry, Amethyst, the blog, the support site on Facebook, the whole shebang. He was quite interested in it. According to him Fibro will continue to remain a Rheumatoid diagnosis and not Neurological. He gave me the classic description of the 1990 American College of Rheumatoidology criteria for diagnosis. So that shows you how quickly these new thoughts, studies and trials hit the doctors in practice.

Other aspects of my day were hard. I have bad habits, bad discipline, and it is holding me back from all I want to achieve. I had a window of a phase of intense productivity recently and it reminded me of my former self, the one that ran herself into the ground and got CFS and Fibro. I was productive and woke up each morning with a spring in my step (okay so maybe that is not a former habit but I was on Prednisone after all) and got things done. Right now I sleep until nearly noon if you let me, don't want to go to bed at night, am sporadic with walking the dogs, I need to do laundry, my house is a mess and I have more paperwork than I know what to do with. Oh, and if I don't give myself a pedicure soon I am going to be able to cut that paperwork with my overgrown, curling toenails! It is almost like starting to learn how to manage chronic illness all over again when I am already a day late to class, but it is a class I have taken before. Always learning how to adapt to revolving symptoms and fluctuating circumstances. Is this what healthy people do? Are they required to roll with what life gives them or do they captain their own vessel? I am craving intense routine and discipline but at this point it would take a drill Sergeant standing over me and shouting my next activity off the type "A" list I cannot get away from, for me to follow any sort of regiment.

When I cleaned my memory boxes from my youth out of my parents garage in preparation for the sale of the house I read some bits and pieces from some old diaries I came across. I was amused and not too shocked to find the same list of "to do's" from high school are amazingly similar to the ones I struggle with today. Get up earlier, be more organized, do my homework before going to ...?, get to bed earlier, lose weight, exercise more and eat less. Do my laundry more often and keep my room clean. So the question authentically popped into my head; do I give in to what is apparently a lifetime of hard-wiring, accepting that this is just who I am and I am not going to be organized or live in a clean house or any of the other 50 things I could do better? Or do I keep practicing and pushing and dusting myself off the horse of perfection just to get right back on and try again tomorrow? I am sure the answer lies somewhere in the middle and I will spend the rest of my life trying to figure it out. Right now, I think I am going to go meditate for a while.

Thanks for joining,

Leah

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